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5 Questions You Need to Ask About Mobile

Why should mobile matter to advertisers? Because it connects the physical and digital worlds and brings a campaign literally into the palm of your hand.

“We must start thinking about mobile first and see how it connects with the other parts of a campaign,” said Deutsch LA Director of UX, Adam Sant during the mobile installment of our DSchool sessions. Creative development is changing to accommodate mobile—but in order to make any changes, we needed to understand mobile a little better first.

1. What is mobile?

What was essentially a talking brick has become a whole world of smartphones and tablets. In today’s world, we rely on two major operating systems: Android from Google and IOS from Apple. For Apple it’s pretty simple, the iPhone and the iPad, but when we start looking at Android, it’s a much more complex ecosystem with more than 60 phones and 21 tablets from a variety of manufacturers. Windows and Blackberry still remain players, however small.

2. Why is it important?

54% of US mobile subscribers now have smartphones and 14.6% of all US web traffic now comes from smartphone users. Such numbers prove that mobile is a medium we must start leveraging.

3. What’s the role of the tablet?

“In less than two years, nearly 40 million tablets were in use among mobile subscribers in the U.S., outpacing smartphones which took 7 years to achieve the same level of adoption.” This quote from Comscore sums it up pretty clearly. The tablet has made its mark and it’s here to stay. We must start thinking about touchscreen experiences.

4. What’s the advantage of apps?

Apps are optimal for tasks, navigation and connecting with friends, but with 700,000 IOS apps in the Apple app store and 600,000 Android apps, there’s a lot of competition. It’s not just about creating an app, you must drive people to it.

They allow access to all of your phone’s native features and enable notifications. Unfortunately they also require an update to repair bugs and enable new functionality, not to mention a different build for every platform.

5. How do you design for the mobile web?

While shopping apps are catching up quick, people predominately shop using their web browser. Although mobile web only provides limited access to a phone’s native features, it is quicker to build, updates are seamless, and one build is optimized for all platforms.

Creating a mobile-formatted site lets you simplify the desktop experience. Rather than cramming a whole website into a mobile device, you can simplify the information that’s needed on the screen, uncover what’s most relative, and make the information much more relevant.

The mobile web permits responsive design allowing you to build a website that works across multiple screens. The site can actually recognize the size of the screen and depending on the width, will display information that is relevant to that size.

It’s important to remember that mobile is more than just apps and fancy technology. In creating developing new mobile opportunities, we must take into consideration the context of where people are and what they need because, as we know, they always have their phones with them.